Dropbox Will Host European Customer Data With AWS In Germany

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Dropbox tells TechWeek it’s prepared for Privacy Shield and plans to open offices in Amsterdam and Hamburg to boost European push

No conversation can be had with a cloud company this year without bringing up data privacy. The proposed Privacy Shield framework will, in 2016, affect data hosting in Europe, but Dropbox said it is prepared.

It was recently as recently as December that Dropbox revealed it would be building infrastructure in Europe to store data locally and today, the company announced that from the third quarter of 2016 European business customer file contents will be held in Germany, in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Desire

Thomas Hansen, Dropbox’s global vice president of sales who joined Dropbox last summer after a long stint at Microsoft, was enthusiastic about the news. “We will continue to build out our infrastructure, and continue to invest,” he told TechWeekEurope from Amsterdam.

“We have heard loud and clear from business customers in Europe the desire to have data hosted inside of Europe. We’re providing customers with the choice. We’re pleased to see that there’s an agreement that’s been reached around Privacy Shield.”

The move looks to boost Dropbox’s enterprise appeal in Europe. With a host of business customers already signed up in Europe (TamTam, Channel 4, Boots, and Conde Nast to name a few), Dropbox will be anticipating the privacy workaround will only make it more of a juicy platform.

“The most expeditious way for us to do this is to use a trusted third-party provider so today we are also announcing that we will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host business customer file contents in Europe. We believe this will create more options for our business customers in the near term,” said Hansen on a Dropbox blog post today.

European offices

To strengthen this European push, Dropbox will also be opening new offices on the continent.

According to the firm, almost 75 percent of its 400 million-strong user base is outside of the United States, with a ‘significant portion’ existing in Europe.

Dropbox opened its first office in Europe in Dublin and expanded its presence with new London and Paris locations a few months ago. Now it is coming to the Netherlands and Germany.

The Amsterdam office will be headed up by country manager Chris Moojen, who jumped ship from Google where he was top of the sales ladder for Google for Work for the Benelux countries.

Dropbox is keen to emphasise the importance of Benelux for its business. The company claimed the countries have some of the highest penetration and engagement rates of any region— approximately 49 percent of the internet population in these countries are Dropbox users.

In the coming months a Hamburg office is also penciled in that will act as a hub for Dropbox’s German, Swiss and Austrian operations.